Crystal Reports and Visual Studio 2010

Friday, February 19 2010 - Data Access

If like me, you have a “can’t live with it, can’t live without it” relationship with Crystal Reports and have made a significant investment in reporting with their tools, you might be digging around the VS2010 RC looking for Crystal.

CR has been embedded into Visual Basic and Visual Studio for many versions. My experience goes back as far as Visual Basic 4, but in fact it started in 1993 with VB 2!

But it’s not in VS2010 RC. Well, kinda not in there.

Crystal Report is included in the project item templates:

cra

But when you select it, something odd happens. Rather than a designer, you will get this window:

crb

So it’s still available as a free extension to VS, just not built in. It’s odd that Crystal isn’t listed in the Extensions gallery that you can access through the VS2010 Extension Manager (on the Tools menu) or online at www.visualstudiogallery.com.

There’s an extensive blog post on the SAP website about Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 which also lists new features, including a WPF report viewer.

I haven’t tried any of them out yet. What I’m most interested in is the design time experience with Entity Framework graphs. In VS2008, neither CR nor MS Reports recognizes navigation properties. A quick look at MS Reports (rdlc) in VS2010 suggests that this hasn’t changed. I’ll have to dig further at some point.

#1 william simons on 2.20.2010 at 5:09 PM

julie,

I will definetely buying your second EF book . I hope you include poco objects as well as generating entity framework using the code only, database only,model only, etc.Are they any good tutorials on using poco??I am a big oop fan!! By the way I was told by one sap person

crystal reports will include a

silverlight beta product around the same time visual studio 2010 will be introduced... By the way I always recommend your book on the silverlight site and I saw your book recommended on the msdn data driven site as well....I wish your book came out earlier.....Take care

#2 Julie on 2.20.2010 at 5:15 PM

Hi Bill. Oh yes POCOs in the book. I did a series on Repositories with POCOs and a pair of webcasts (look for them on notatpdc.com) and lots of pepole have been blogging about repositories with EF POCOs.

Thanks for pointing folks to my book. :)

julie

#3 Vijay on 2.23.2010 at 1:18 PM

Since SSRS & BIDS is available, i wonder if we would still need Crystal Reports ?

#4 Richard on 2.23.2010 at 5:24 PM

I hate Crystal. Its a pain especially when dealing with form printing. I am trying out Stimulsoft and seeing if its going to work but so far so good.

#5 Mehmood Masood on 4.05.2010 at 2:51 AM

Hi,

I would like to need some detail info about the crystal report ..give me updates also....

Thanks & Regards,

Mehmood

#6 Richard Mathis on 4.27.2010 at 11:22 AM

What I'm looking for is how to disable VS2010 from trying to convert the solution from using an older version of Crystal! If you're like us, we have no interest in converting and it will, in fact, only break things on the production server if we do!

#7 Steve Levy on 5.05.2010 at 9:56 AM

We're trying the embedded version of Crystal Reports for our VS2010 environment in WPF. The design mode seems to work, but connecting with our EDM objects yields a blank report. Is there some way that the data Context must be specified to the report page?

#8 Julie on 5.05.2010 at 10:08 AM

Hi Steve,

I'm not sure what the problem could be and can't stop to investigate. Could you try on the CR forums and then leave another comment here as to the issue/solution?

#9 Steve Levy on 5.05.2010 at 10:51 AM

Thanks, Julie - I'll try leaving a note on the SAP CR forum; was wondering if this was intended to work, or if it is just one of our wishes. If I find out, I will post the solution.

#10 serhio on 5.21.2010 at 8:04 AM

What about people that have installed separately CrystalReports? VS 2010 has a strange behavior finding the references to CR: it does not find it, even if you explicitly browse for them.

The bug report: connect.microsoft.com/.../vs-2010-net-4-c

#11 Giorgio Gudino on 6.09.2010 at 2:00 PM

When yuo distribute your aplication appear "This is a demo not for distribution.."

#12 pathak gaurang on 6.15.2010 at 9:23 AM

Assembly not found, when using crystal Report for c#.net 2010

pls.. help me

#13 SAW on 7.22.2010 at 6:22 AM

Here is the solution >>>

go to tab "File" >>> "Properties"

select "Application" from left list

and change the value of "target framework" to ".Net framework 4"

then restart the application and

enjoy using Crytal Report 2010

#14 Nathan on 8.06.2010 at 6:29 PM

I have had the same problem viewing a crystal report in WPF. My app runs SSRS and Crystal. Below is the code for viewing a crystal report. Data binding is separate.

private void view_crystal()

{

string ballType = this.cmbBallType.Text;

string reportName = this.comboBoxReportName.Text;

viewer vr = new viewer(reportName,ballType, this.datePickerFromDate.SelectedDate.Value, this.datePickerToDate.SelectedDate.Value);

vr.Show();

}